Baedeker

Baedeker, KARL, a German publisher, born in 1801 at Essen, where since 1797 his father had carried on the business of printer and bookseller. He himself started in business in 1827 at Coblenz, where he died, October 4, 1859. He is best and everywhere known as the originator of a series of admirable guidebooks. With Murray's 'Handbooks' for their pattern, the German works, in the course of successive editions, have been so improved and entirely rewritten, that they have come in most essentials to equal, and in some to surpass their models; and now the guides are published in the principal languages of Europe. The business was removed in 1872 to Leipzig, carried on under the son of the founder. The first guidebook published by Karl Baedeker was a small book on the Rhine, of which in 1839 he produced a third edition entirely rewritten by himself (21st ed. 1881). Between that time and 1893, when an excellent guide to the United States was published, the word Baedeker has become almost a synonym for guidebook.